


A Favour

by NeverwinterThistle



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Amputation, Canon-Typical Violence, Captivity, Gore, Hopeful Ending, Other, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-22 19:31:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13771008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/pseuds/NeverwinterThistle
Summary: By the third day, Jon is peering at his notebook through a world half-sheathed in darkness, scribbling on a page made damp by tears.





	A Favour

**Author's Note:**

> (Shows up late to Jon/Michael day with...gore. Yeah. That happened).
> 
> A.K.A the one where Jon gets captured by something that tries very hard to strip him of his Archivist powers, the hard way. Mind the tags, this fic is rated M for violence, there is no smut here. There is no major character death, however, and the ending is not bleak. Just exercise a bit of discretion in reading.

By the third day, Jon is peering at his notebook through a world half-sheathed in darkness, scribbling on a page made damp by tears. Not blood; there are drips of it on earlier pages, spreading out like inkblots, like the expanding spirals of a stone on the surface of a still lake. He tried to write with it at first. Like a child daubing finger paints on paper, like a coded message in a bottle bobbing on the sea, like a desperate man who has spent three days in a lightless cell as his means of witnessing are taken from him, one by one.

They won’t let him write in blood anymore; when it starts to seep through sterile linens, he is stopped. The bandages are changed. This is done without the aid of light, to the tune of Jon’s befuddled pleading.

He still believes Elias will come. If he is staunch and unrepentant in his records, if he writes his truths and signs the pages with black ink and saline, if he sacrifices, then Elias will come.

Jude sacrificed, he tells himself, when he has thoughts to spare from screaming. First she killed for the flame that kissed her skin sub-surface, licking up the insides of her veins, fuelling her like gas in the pipes of a kitchen stove. First she gave it devastation, and then she gave it gasoline and personhood, and now she is a waxen woman who scalds. A biothermal acolyte. A molten monstrosity, and her god is pleased. Jude sacrificed, and was accepted.

This is what he tells himself on the first day, when they tie down his left arm and remove his hand at the wrist. Jude made sacrifices. The Flame was pleased.

( _There is a creak on the first day, the shrill metallic protest of a door with grinding hinges, as Jon peers into the darkness, blind as a deep sea diver without a torch. He leans towards the sound. He never has before, but now there is concrete at his back, under his feet, above his head and all around him, and his left hand ends where it is wrapped in black-stained bandages, and his voice ends where his screaming broke it off._

_“Hello,” he whispers, rasping, and it’s such a nice change to hurt somewhere that isn’t his diminished wrist._

_There is a wavering in the shadows on his left, fuzzing in and out like static in an ill-tuned radio. Michael folds itself into the space at his side. Jon shrinks back._

_“You look terrible,” it tells him, its tone overwrought, ill-simulated sympathy and unrepentant laughter. “Are you having a bad day?”_

_Jon wants to laugh with it. He’s afraid of what his laugh would sound like. “I’m not doing too well right now,” he says, and his voice is soft, shockingly high, frilled at the edges with lace-like hysteria. “Yourself?”_

_“I’m so sorry to hear that,” it says, and it is lying. Jon forgives it. Michael is what it is, and Jon is what he is, and neither of them can change that. They are fixed points with circumstantial overlap, like two constellations with one shared star._

_Michael sighs, a madman’s quivering misery. “Do you think there’ll be a rescue?” it asks. “I…don’t think it seems likely, but you never know.”_

_“Yes,” Jon says. He tilts his head back, skull smacking against the concrete, staring up at where he imagines the ceiling must lie. There are no stars in the darkness. There is no light at all. “I’m the Archivist. I’m loyal, I…I’ve made sacrifices for the Beholding, I’ve given it so much, I-” he cries like an abandoned child, like a dog without a master, like a man in an unlit cell who knows his god has left him for good._

_There is a handkerchief in Michael’s hands. It holds his chin with fingers like jagged seaside rocks, and gently dabs his cheeks dry. Jon thanks it. He tries not to ache when it leaves)._

They have given him a pen and notebook. The ink is unending and the pages grow and multiply, so that however many he scribbles through there are always more. Jon tries to see it as a metaphor for his work; that it will never be done, that there will always be another page to fill, and that Elias needs to rescue him because there is so much still to do.

There is a moment in the middle of the second night, when the sounds of his shivering only half reach him, and he realises that the notebook is his obituary. It is his statement. It will be given to his master when the darkness devours him entire, entitled, _Last Words of Jonathan Sims, Archivist_ , and that this in turn will be left on the desk of his replacement. Not Tim; already too far gone, fed on like a feebly twitching carcass. Not Martin; too much bleeding heart, not enough detachment. Melanie would do. Basira might last longer, even; she comes equipped with her own guard dog.

No, Jon tells himself. None of them are him, none of them have walked the road he has, none have given as much, none have sacrificed. The Archives need him. Elias will come.

( _On the second day, Michael brings him a buttercup. Jon takes it in his one remaining hand, cradling it gently._

_“I thought you might like it,” Michael tells him._

_“Thank you.”_

_“How was your day?”_

_Jon gives a crackling laugh he can only hear on one side. “Not ideal.”_

_“Perhaps tomorrow will be an improvement.”_

_Jon gives the buttercup back, directing Michael to hold the flower upright and steady. It obeys, careful not to slice the stem apart._

_“There’s a game children play,” he tells it. “They find a flower and pull off the petals, one by one, to find out if someone loves them. A sort of superstition. The last petal you land on is supposed to be your answer.” With Michael holding the flower for him, Jon pulls at petals, reciting the old prayer._

_The last petal falls, and with it the depleted flower. “That’s a shame,” Michael says. “He loves you not.”_

_“It’s just a superstition.”_

_“Yes.”_

_When Michael leaves, Jon grinds the buttercup petals into mush under his thumb)._

Mike Crew made sacrifices, Jon tells himself on the third day. Mike Crew was scarred by his master. He gave decades of terror, the blood of his parents and the people he killed, the countless times he cowered from his stalker’s false storms. And, finally, Mike Crew gave his life to the fall and the rush of the wind. Soared free in a body made lighter by the absence of human heart. Mike sacrificed, and was saved.

Jon tells himself this when his head is pressed into a vice, the metal digging cold and unyielding into his temples, and latex-wrapped fingers hold his eyelid open and half the world goes blacker than pitch. Mike Crew made sacrifices, some of them painful. And this…this is a test.

When they leave him alone, Jon pulls out his notebook and makes record of his newest loss. It’s difficult to do, with no light source or sense of space on the page he assumes must be white. He wonders what it must look like; the uneven ramblings, ill-measured letters of a man who has words in his mind, and ever fewer ways to express them.

( _“You can’t help me, can you?” Jon asks. He has a chess piece in his hand, a pawn that he rolls between his fingers, squeezing its shape into his skin. He understands why Michael gave it to him, the message it wants to convey. Subtle metaphor is not the Spiral’s forte. Or maybe it just thinks he’s not in a place to grasp subtleties at the moment. That’s fair._

_“No,” Michael tells him. Its tone is melancholy, ringed with laughter like flowers encircling the varnished wood of a coffin. “Not in this place, I am…limited here. The Pitch and I have cooperated in the past, of course, and will do so again, but I…do not think I am wanted here. Tolerated, yes, though barely. And not for free.”_

_“What did it cost you?”_

_“A favour.”_

_“Was it worth it?” Jon asks. “Whatever you paid, was it worth the fun of watching them make me…less?”_

_Michael is silent for much too long. Jon turns the pawn between shaking fingers. It is slippery, sweaty, and feels smaller than it used to. More fragile. He wonders if he could crush it to dust._

_“I thought I would enjoy it,” Michael says at last. It is disgruntled, sulky. “I thought it would be an interesting ending to a stray thread of narrative I have followed with such…diligence. A brief diversion, the beginning of the end. But it’s not actually much fun at all, is it?”_

_“No,” Jon agrees._

_“Your replacement won’t be the same. They won’t be…enough.”_

_“I wasn’t enough,” Jon says. The admission has been a long time coming, but still it hurts him, like a cramp that seizes every muscle in his body. “It was supposed to be Gertrude, but she went rogue and I wasn’t ready.”_

_“You did very well,” Michael tells him. “For what it’s worth, I…am impressed.”_

_Jon can’t tell if it’s lying. When it leaves, he squeezes the tiny chess piece hard, though its edges are too blunt to cut him open. Still, he tries. And when he fails, he flings it from him with an animal yell that echoes in one ear, and there is no sound of impact. The shadows stretch away from him, warm, damp, infinite)._

They never speak when they come to hurt him. Jon can’t tell how many there are, who they are, whether or not they regret what they do. He supposes that’s part of the point. They are taking his witnessing, unmaking the watcher, and why would they give him any more information than they need to? He tries to compel on the first few days; they hurt him, and he stops. He hasn’t tried since. No doubt Elias will read his scrappy, shaky statement. He will know what Jon knows, and that means it’s best to keep Jon in the dark.

Literally; on the fourth day, they take his other eye. Jon cries himself dry into the patches they tape to his head, soft and sterile, and fumbles again for his notebook. They give it to him. Push his pen into his hand before leaving, and he wonders if they think they are doing him a kindness. If the pitch black has a concept of mercy.

And then he wonders if this is the promise they made Elias. The Archivist’s last statement. The honest record of the Beholding’s most sacrificing servant. A cold comfort, he imagines, if it means the war is lost; if he couldn’t stop it, then none of his assistants will either. But he suspects by now it doesn’t matter. Whatever Elias might have hoped, Jon is not and has never been enough.

_(“I can’t see you anymore,” Jon says to the darkness. He speaks in response to the creak of a hinge, the breath of breeze that crosses his face. “I suppose I should be grateful, you scare the hell out of me.”_

_“Yes,” Michael agrees, settling into its usual place at his side. “So I am often told.”_

_“Are you going to ask me how my day was?”_

_“Will it help?”_

_“No.”_

_“Then I’ll refrain from asking.”_

_“Look at that,” Jon says. “The world is ending and you pick now to develop a sense of tact.”_

_“The world is not ‘ending’, Archivist,” Michael says, and Jon shivers at the title it gives him. He does still deserve it, he supposes. Although the mantle grows ill-fitting, grows too large by the day. He is shrinking. Soon it will smother him. “A change is coming. You will not see it, but the world will continue in a different way, with new rules and new deceptions. A less…colourful world, I suspect. There will be fewer words for fear.”_

_“The Unknowing,” Jon says. “Elias made it sound so…awful. Like the worst thing that could possibly happen. I suppose it is, for us. Whatever it is. But your side doesn’t mind it.”_

_“I don’t have a side,” Michael tells him. “I will thrive, either way. I have no attachments.”_

_“Then why are you here?”_

_It doesn’t answer._

_Jon reaches with his one remaining hand, feeling through the clinging threads of darkness. He finds skin like soft, damp leather that ripples where he presses. Serpentine musculature, like an eel’s back breaking the surface of a lake, and then diving back down. There are no bones in what he presumes is Michael’s shoulder. Only the uncanny ripple of indecisive insides, moving without direction. His hand stings with the precursor to pins and needles._

_“You’re like a badly stuffed cloth doll,” Jon tells it. “Filled with god knows what; do you even know? I suppose it’s whatever you think will most frighten your newest victim. Swapping your shape out to scare. Were you the one that stalked Mike Crew?” He finds what he assumes is its face; finds a brief sharpness, cold and overlong, like the teeth of a shark, or the demolishing jaws of a metal excavator._

_“No,” Michael tells him. Jon feels its words sting the palm of his hand. “That was another what, another…limb, you could say. Long since destroyed by an unfortunate lack of caution.”_

_“And you took Mike’s name.”_

_“A small revenge,” Michael says, chuckling into Jon’s fingers. It bites him then, gently, nipping at his knuckles. He doesn’t pull his hand away. “And a form of tribute; he was very clever about the binding.”_

_“Not clever enough to avoid getting shot.”_

_“No. All good things come to an end, I suppose.”_

_“Is that what the Unknowing is?” Jon asks. “An end to a good thing?” Again, Michael doesn’t answer. It sits very still and lets him touch it as he pleases, knowing, perhaps, that he won’t have the hand for much longer. Until tomorrow, probably. Or the day after, if they want to let him keep writing. Perhaps it’ll be the other eardrum next. Jon suspects they’ll leave his tongue for last. Or perhaps not; he wonders if he should make the most of it while it’s there._

_He kisses Michael because there is nothing else he can do, alone in the darkness that seeps slowly into his pores, his open wounds, his absent eyes. Because what does it matter, in the end? Elias is not coming. The rescue was never sent. There is no one left to tell him that he shouldn’t, mustn’t, that all rules of physics decree it impossible. He kisses Michael and finds warmth in its mouth that warms him in turn, a stab of gratitude as its teeth retract and it does not bite him bloody. Its tongue stings his; sparks like static electricity. It doesn’t hurt. He’s so grateful for that._

_Long after that first spark of madness is gone, Michael keeps kissing him, swallowing Jon’s muted shivers, and its lips are curved with a laughter he now finds comforting. He leans into it. Lets it take his weight into its wavering form, and lick into his mouth until all he tastes is the sting and the static and the metallic tang of door hinges and blood._

_“Take my name next,” he whispers into its mouth._

_“No,” it says, and he knows that it is not lying)._

The cell smells brackish, when it doesn’t smell of blood.

Jon spends his time against the wall, scribbling with increasing shakiness. His body seems to have entered a sort of stasis, has stilled and shut down all but his breathing and heartbeat. He hasn’t eaten or drunk since being put here. He feels neither hunger nor thirst. Only the pain, and the need to record it.

His writing grows ever less professional. There are only so many ways he can describe what is being done to him; for a time, he considers recording his life story. The history of his parents, his grandmother, his unhappy years at school, his loneliness and sense of exile, the sources of his misanthropy. But Elias probably knows already, and if he doesn’t then Jon is disinclined to share it with him. Instead, he scribbles pages and pages of curses aimed at his master. Pleas turned to bargains turned to jagged rage and _I will never forgive you for this_. As if it matters. Elias isn’t coming.

Melanie, Jon decides after a while. Melanie would make a good Archivist. She has more common sense, curiosity, a certain hardiness that means her questions will always overrule her sense of safety. And she comes with the advantage of already knowing something of the threat, though even that will not be enough, and she will die young and unprepared, like Jon himself.

Jon thinks longingly of corridors, the unending intestinal maze with its yellow carpets and black rug, the walls with their mirrors and paintings. He imagines losing himself in its curves, losing his mind to the sameness and symmetry, looking off into the distance to find the monster looking back.

It would not have been a good end.

It would have been better than this.

_(He can’t hear the creak of Michael’s door, but its laughter permeates the inside of his skull like a physical sensation, a television without reception, the grey-black-white buzz that bounces around the synapses of his mind._

_“Hello,” he tries. “Good to…have you here.”_

_When it responds, its words etch themselves into his grey matter. He cannot hear; instead, he feels. “Archivist,” it says. “Your time grows short.”_

_“I hope so.”_

_“Not much longer now,” it tells him. “Does that…help?”_

_“I’m tired,” Jon says. Now he thinks about it, he hasn’t slept at all since coming here. Only passed the days and nights in unchanging darkness, counting time by the things that are taken from him. “I just…I need to rest, I can’t do this anymore.”_

_“That is not your choice to make.”_

_“None of them are.”_

_Jon shuffles forward to let Michael arrange itself against the wall behind him, and then leans back into its chest, which sinks and shapes itself around him like an overstuffed chair. He asks it if he is talking too loud, or too quietly; apologises, and says he can’t hear himself. Michael tells him it’s fine. That it’s going to be alright. The lie is just too much to take._

_Jon screams soundlessly into its chest. After a while, it starts to stroke his hair. It is gentle, mindful of its cutting grip. It tells him again: he’s going to be alright._

_“Fuck off,” Jon says, and pulls himself free. It leaves him. He aches)._

There is no rescue the next day either, and Michael does not come to see him. This is unfortunate; he can no longer scribble his ramblings and curses into the notebook, though it sits at his side in the darkness. He wishes they’d taken it. He begged them to, because what on earth is the point if he can’t even hold a pen anymore?

If they answered, he could not hear them. Tomorrow they will take his tongue.

_(“Michael?” Jon whispers into the darkness. Or shouts, maybe. Hard to tell. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, I…please. Please come back.”_

_It doesn’t come. And alone in the darkness, counting the hours, Jon starts to wonder if it was ever there at all.)_

There is sunlight on his face. Jon can feel it, tilts his face towards the heat he cannot see, mouths thankful words he cannot shape, and raises his wrists to the light. He stumbles as soon as they let him go. Falls and is caught, and for a moment he thinks, _Elias_. But Elias’ hands are not as sharp as knives, and his laughter isn’t a migraine that throbs through Jon’s nervous system, and Michael is lifting him gently from the ground.

 _Hello_ , Jon thinks, and hopes it can hear him. _Come to interfere again? I don’t think a door is going to cut it this time_.

“Come along, Archivist,” it says, and Jon shudders at the title that should no longer fit him, but still sits around his frame like a second skin. “We have a lot of work to do.”

Jon passes out to its quivering mirth, shaking him senseless, away from the pain.

He wakes in a hospital.

The ceiling is white, bland, blinding after so long in the shadows. Jon digs his fingers into the sheets, blinking as they rustle, stunned that he can hear them. _Right,_ he thinks. _Hell is a hospital. Of course it is, what else would it be? Christ._ He wonders if Sasha is here, in the room next door, or the next floor down. He wonders about his grandmother, his parents. If Melanie has taken his role and died for it yet.

And then he blinks again and sees her sitting at his bedside, flicking her way through a thick paperback. She is bored with it, frowning at the pages with all the aggression of someone who has nothing else to entertain them, but would rather watch paint dry. She is more than half way through.

Jon forces saliva into his mouth, and swallows. “Hello?” he says.

Melanie looks up. “Thank god for that,” she says. “They said you’d be fine, but I wasn’t too sure I wanted to believe them.”

“What…what’s going on?” Jon says. “How am I here, I was- I shouldn’t be here. Am I dead?”

“Hope not. Because if you are, so am I, and I’m supposed to be meeting Georgie for drinks this evening. She’s been wondering why you went quiet all of a sudden. I’ve been telling her it was work stuff, so. Better send her a text or something.”

“Work stuff,” Jon repeats. He turns his eyes back to the ceiling. The light, harsh and biting, stings tears into the corners of his eyes. He thinks about asking for a mirror. He wants to know what colour they are. If they even remotely resemble his own. And he thinks of Georgie, asking after him, texting a phone he doesn’t have anymore and asking Melanie about him and being lied to. His hands start to shake.

“Where _were_ you?” Melanie demands. “And why the hell did Elias give me this?” From under her book, she pulls a sheaf of paper. Jon recognises it immediately: the Archivist’s contract. His contract. He was right, then. Melanie is his replacement.

“I…” Jon says. He’s struggling. He’s not in pain, but he’s so sure he is, and here is the proof of what he should have known; Elias was never going to save him.

Melanie watches him with something like pity, and something like fear. Wise of her. “You were dead,” she says. “Weren’t you? Or at least he thought you were, which is pretty much the same thing. I mean, he gave me this the day after you didn’t come into work, and the look on his face…I don’t know. Hope I never have to see that again, is all.”

The ceiling is odd, Jon decides. It’s…too clean. Too sterile. Normal ceilings have cracks or cobwebs, shadows on their surfaces. This one looks as if it’s just been scrubbed. The walls are much the same. The room is almost too bright to take on shadows.

“Jon,” Melanie says. “Earth to Jon? Are you in there?”

“Why didn’t you sign it?” he asks. He doesn’t knowingly compel her, but she shivers anyway.

“Your Michael,” she says, and Jon grips the sheets tight. “He made a pretty convincing case for me not signing.”

“When?”

“Third day after you vanished,” Melanie says. “The day after Elias gave me the contract. I was in your office, just…staring off into the distance, I guess. Trying to make my mind up. And then he- no. It. _It_ showed up and told me I wasn’t going to sign the thing. Made it pretty clear that I was dead if I did, there wasn’t any subtlety going on there. Bloody rude of it.”

“Yes,” Jon says distantly. “Well. The third day? Right. I think…you not signing that contract might have kept me alive.”

“I did wonder,” Melanie says. “And not to scare you, but I’m pretty sure that thing is smitten. With you, specifically. So good luck with that. Oh, and the doctor said that you should move your hands around a bit to make sure they’d…sprouted properly? Um. Didn’t ask for details, I don’t think I want to know. But if you want to give me a hand-” she grips the contract by the edges and tears it viciously in half. Jon accepts the wad of paper she gives him.

They shred her contract in companionable silence.

_(Michael comes later. It strolls into his room through a door- real or not, Jon finds he doesn’t care- with a victor’s swagger and a laugh that raises the hairs on the back of Jon’s neck._

_“I told you so,” it says._

_“Yes,” Jon agrees. He’s still in his hospital bed, still confused, still finding confetti-like scraps of white paper in the folds of his papery gown. “Yes, I…I suppose you did.”_

_“Give my regards to your master, won’t you?”_

_“When I’m done punching him.” It’s a lovely idea. A nice thought, one Jon relishes, hopes for, and knows will never get past fantasy. He will step back into the Archives, be embraced and entrapped by its power, and the most he will manage is impotent rage. Elias will welcome him home. Jon will not punch him. Jon will go back to his desk and record his statements until the next time something decides to take trophies from his flesh._

_Unless Michael decides to stay._

_“What about the Unknowing?” Jon asks._

_Michael gives a jerky shrug, its outline wavering. “Not a very interesting concept,” it says, off-hand, as if describing the weather. As if the pronouncement and its implications don’t change everything. “I…think I prefer things as they are now. Not that I really prefer anything.”_

_“You’re a liar,” Jon tells it. “An irritant, a…thank you. Thank you.”_

_“It’s no trouble,” Michael says serenely._

_It settles down at his side, incongruously casual, fingers clacking together as it folds its hands across its stomach. Closes its eyes. It is utterly still, like a sculpted man, like an imitation wax model. Jon feels unspeakably safer. After a while, he sleeps._

_There are no shadows in his dreams; only corridors stretching out in all directions, curving out of sight. Lamps to light the way, and no one is trying to hurt him. The walls quiver, quaking with laughter._

_Jon starts walking)._


End file.
